Fat is a familiar theme for movie's director

By PETER CALDER

When Patricia Cardoso was six growing up in the Colombian capital of Bogota, she made a picture about fatness, but it was bovine rather than human corpulence.

The "movie" was a series of drawings on a long paper strip which she would roll around sticks and unspool across a "screen" cut out of a cardboard box. "It was like a little homemade television, I suppose."

Like most kids, she took her inspiration from family life which was an unpredictable mixture of plenty and scarcity. The homemade film's title (which translates as Fat Cows and Skinny Cows) is the Spanish equivalent of the expression "a feast or a famine".

Cardoso's new movie, an award-winning, tiny, independent production which has the makings of a sleeper hit, is also about fatness.

Real Women Have Curves, which was voted audience favourite at the Sundance Film Festival last year, is the story of a young woman whose aspirations to be defined by something other than her past and her body shape create waves in her tightknit Chicano family.

Ana (17-year-old America Ferrera in a debut of radiant sincerity) wants to go to university but her bitter, overbearing mother (Latina star Lupe Ontiveros) wants her to work in the family sweatshop in East Los Angeles where they run up $18 dresses which sell for $600 in Bloomingdales.

The conflict might resound among immigrant families of many cultures, but the film has a sharp take on the theme suggested in the title: the corrosive effects of the tyranny of thinness. "I'm so much more than just my weight," Ana insists, but her mother, who isn't comfortable with her own rolls of flab, doesn't agree.

Cardoso is aware that the film's title and subject matter might appeal more to women than men. "But I would hope it speaks to men too because it's about accepting yourself and loving yourself for who you are," she says.

The film started life as a hit play staged at San Francisco's underground Teatro de la Esperanza in 1990. The screenplay, in successive drafts by playwright Josefina Lopez, producer George LaVoo and Cardoso, opened out a concept which was confined to a single set.

In months of research, walking the streets where the film would eventually be shot, the director scouted locations and observed situations on which she hung scenes. "It was a challenge to make it more cinematic and visual, so we created scenes to serve that," she says.

The research process helped her to get to know the world of the play which was far from her own middle-class upbringing. But she says the domineering mother figure was familiar .

"My mother always thought she knew what was best for me," she says, "and she would get very upset with me if I gained a few pounds.

"She actually wrote these rules for me - she was an MIT-educated architect and I was in my early 20s - about how to behave in the house. A boyfriend was allowed to stay until 11pm and if he overstayed she would come and ring this bell outside my door and kick him out of the house."

Cardoso is philosophical about how hard it was to finance the film: "Nobody wants to make a movie about women who are overweight, particularly when they are Latina women, and we had no role for a star. It's very hard to get a movie financed if there isn't a star attached."

In the end, it attracted the attention of HBO, the cable channel behind such small-screen hits as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. It was made for broadcast but its success at Sundance had theatrical distributors lining up to buy it, and it has become HBO's first cinematic release.

Made for a mere US$4 million ($7.1 million), it has taken more than US$6 million ($10.6 million) and has yet to be released internationally.

Understandably, that sort of success keeps the phone ringing, but Cardoso is cautious, conscious that Hollywood has a way of capturing free spirits only to tame them.

" The movies I have been offered are all about teenagers but I have been cautious. I have seen too many of my friends do one good film and then do something too Hollywood that doesn't do well and then their career is over.

"I want to be more picky. It might be a studio project but I would want it to be small so that I would have a lot of creative freedom."

That kind of freedom, of course, is what gives the film its appeal. Its final scenes break all the Hollywood rules, rejecting a feelgood formula in favour of an ending which is at best ambiguous and certainly more realistic than romantic.

"We shot a happy ending," Cardoso says, "but later when I was doing the cut I thought ending it the way I did was more real. It's real life: you don't know what's going to happen. I was surprised the producers allowed me to have that ending, but they agreed, so it was a happy ending for me."

* Real Women Have Curves screens at Auckland's Rialto Cinema in previews this weekend and begins its season from next Thursday, March 13.